Legislative

The public (63%) does not support private school vouchers: every time a voucher program has been put to a vote in the past 45 years, the voters have rejected it. Despite this disapproval, Governors around the country are trying to push private school voucher policies through bills and state budgets. Read more

This year’s saga of state Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bills is nearing the end, but has not come to a complete stop, yet. We continue to monitor RFRA bills in North Carolina and Michigan. Meanwhile, many other bills are moving through state legislatures and have been introduced in Congress that would allow religious beliefs to justify discrimination in adoption placements by state-funded, private adoption agencies. Read more

We’ve been blogging a lot about state Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bills that could potentially allow discrimination against the LGBT community in the name of religion. We have also been closely following a surge of “religious freedom” bills that would specifically permit individuals—and oftentimes government officials—to refuse to recognize, perform, or issue licenses for marriages. Read more

In our last update on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), we asked all of our members and supporters to reach out to their legislators and tell them to reject any amendment that would create private school vouchers. Thanks in large part to that effort, we won the private school voucher fight! However, we ended up with a very different church-state fight on the floor.

The recent flood of state-level Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bills continues. We oppose these bills because they could allow not just individuals, but also private corporations, to violate important laws—like non-discrimination, public safety, and public health protections—in the name of religion. This week there was both good news and bad news in the world of state RFRAs.

This morning, Michigan’s House Judiciary Committee discussed and voted out Speaker Jase Bolger’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bill, HB 5958. Some members of the committee offered amendments, including one that would have prohibited the bill from being used to violate anti-discrimination or civil rights laws in Michigan, but no amendments were adopted. Read more